The controversy that has engulfed that now all-but-scuttled appointment of Charles Freeman to the post of National Intelligence Council leader is, I think, a bellwether moment for what today passes for “progressive” opinion.  The fashionable charge, leveled by many leftish commentators (mainly in cyberspace), that group of hawkish Jewish pundits have got Israel on the brain and will sacrifice every other question of U.S. foreign policy to this monomaniacal subject appears now to be an acute form of projection. When it was disclosed, for instance, that Freeman, president to the Middle East Policy Council and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was the recipient of $1 million of Saudi largesse, and has been a rather outspoken apologist for the kingdom – he referred at one point to its King Abdullah as “Abdullah the Great”– the expected liberal response to this would have been a raised eyebrow. Why would the Obama administration, foe of torture and the erasures of civil liberties at home, be amenable to an analyst who has clearly not done much analysis abroad?

Saudi Arabia is founded on Wahhabist Islamic doctrine designed as a means of social control. Its media is state-run, its women are forced to take the veil, Jews from other countries are forbidden entry, and its homosexuals are executed in the capital in a place colloquially known as “Chop-Chop Square” (whose name tells you enough about the means of execution). The Saudi monarchy, despite its declared antipathy to Islamic fundamentalism, underwrites particularly toxic and anti-Semitic editions of the Koran, many of which find their way into American prisons and international madrasas that graduate Islamic terrorists.

As it happens, Freeman himself has played a part in publishing propaganda about Islam and the Middle East. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Middle East Policy Council helped put out an “Arab World Studies Notebook” for use in U.S. schools:

“In the version examined [in 2005] by JTA staff, the "Notebook" described Jerusalem as unequivocally "Arab," deriding Jewish residence in the city as "settlement"; cast the "question of Jewish lobbying" against "the whole question of defining American interests and concerns"; and suggested that the Koran "synthesizes and perfects earlier revelations."

Leave aside the ethnographical and political dubiousness of that paragraph (Jerusalem has never been wholly “Arab,” even when it was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and a Jewish lobby “defining” American interests is more categorical a judgment, you'll agree, than its unduly influencing American interests). If one were to assess Freeman’s viability for the NIC chairmanship only from the standpoint of national security, how would one look on his endorsement of the very sort of religious chauvinism (“perfects earlier revelations”) that our soft and hard power apparatuses are now marshaled to combat? The equivalent would be hiring a Sovietologist during the Cold War who consented to the belief that Kapital was the final word on all matters pertaining to political economy.

Yet here is how M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum reacted to news of Freeman’s Saudi affinity on Talking Points Memo:

So what if Freeman is close to the Saudis. Why should that disqualify him for the intelligence post? Unless he has done something unethical or illegal, these smears are more evidence (if any more is needed) that being deemed overly critical of the occupation is today's equivalent of being called a Communist in 1953. It's a career killer, used to ensure that policymakers adhere to the neocon line."

The “occupation” here refers to the one maintained by Israel over Palestine, and by “overly critical” Rosenberg means Freeman applauds the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis that the U.S. alliance with the Jewish state is undeviating and self-defeating and only driven by an obsessive lobby made up of Jewish and Christian Zionists. Mearsheimer and Walt’s careers have never been better since they published their notorious essay, which the Middle East Policy Council also ran in an unexpurgated version. Freeman found the authors "brave," and the fact that their scholarship was widely discredited across the political spectrum—including within the “realist”  establishment from which M-W claim discipleship—impinges not at all on their courage, of course. Freeman today thinks that because Israel is the bête noir of the Arab world, supporting it means “universalizing anti-Americanism” and incurring more terrorist attacks against the U.S., but this is a belief he did not always hold. In 1998, he was of the opinion that

Mr. bin Laden's principal point, in pursuing this campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, in connection with the Iran-Iraq issue. No doubt the question of American relations with Israel adds to the emotional heat of his opposition and adds to his appeal in the region. But this is not his main point.

Bin Laden would, by this assessment, have a serious grievance with enthusiasts for the Saudi regime, making Freeman and his ilk part of the problem, no?

Now, it would be easy to file Rosenberg’s emission as a one-off were it not so characteristic of a broader leftish response to Freeman’s appointment. The Center for American Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias also welcomed the addition of this lifelong Republican, classifying circulated concerns about Freeman’s fitness for the NIC chair as a “war” initiated by those who suffering from a blindingly pro-Israel bias. Citing the Jewish sources for the contra position (these include Marty Peretz and Jonathan Chait, both of the New Republic, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, and Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard), Yglesias wrote: “I’m not sure whether or not the Obama administration will ultimately stand behind Freeman. I hope they will. But whether or not they do, I think it’s very clear that the lesson here is that if you’re a veteran policy hand who hopes to return to government one day and you believe something that you think AIPAC wouldn’t approve of, that the smart thing to do is to keep those views to yourself.”

AIPAC didn’t approve of Hillary Clinton’s public smooch of Suha Arafat in 1999, and it doesn’t much approve of her proposed aid package to Gaza now. But there she still is, a high-octane secretary of state. As for the official AIPAC comment on Freeman, as of this writing, it consists of no comment at all.  (Steve Rosen, a former AIPAC official who was charged with spying on behalf of Israel, and another former anonymous AIPAC member did speak out against Freeman. If their being voluble only as ex-officials testifies to anything, then it is to the restraining nature of that organization.)

As for the appointee’s own disclosed statements on Israel, these have not been so terribly shocking to anyone who follows the debate closely, an admission the JTA (one of Yglesias’s bugbears of Zionist-orchestrated career destruction) explained in the article I quoted earlier.  His late-formed belief that reducing terror attacks against Americans is moored to a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict -- a prescription sometimes derided as the "Jerusalem Syndrome" -- was the position maintained by James Baker and Lee Hamilton in their Iraq Study Group Report, a white paper commissioned by the Bush administration and thankfully unheeded over the ultimately successful "surge" strategy. That Freeman managed to retain the aura of bureaucratic respectability while holding such traditional realist positions attests more to the endurance of those positions than it does to his ability to pass himself off as something he is not. He believes himself to be a true Burkean conservative when in fact he is an “ideological fanatic,” as Chait rightly put it in the Washington Post. Sometimes – just sometimes – ideological fanatics don’t write for Commentary or the Weekly Standard.

Do Rosenberg and Yglesias really believe that Freeman’s compromising “closeness” to Saudi Arabia is only a threat to Israel and that alarm over this proximity is the exclusive property of a dislodged cadre of policy intellectuals or an ethnic lobby?  That would mean that Craig Unger’s bestselling critique of the Bush family’s warm relationship to the House of Saud and Michael Moore’s darkly traced filiations between Riyadh and Halliburton have now metamorphosed into Mossad conspiracies. It would also mean that the amnesiac left is now intent on doing what no one would have thought it capable of eight years ago: retroactively rehabilitating the legacy of George H.W. Bush.

If Rosenberg means to say that a tendency towards a foreign government does not necessarily impair one’s ability to think strategically on behalf of the United States then I wonder how dispassionately he would react if it were discovered that the NIC appointee regularly vacationed with Avigdor Lieberman, or was the head of a think tank that received a generous endowment from Benjamin Netanyahu.

Interesting, too, that those who have tossed around the “McCarthyite” label were quick to accuse Freeman’s opponents of harboring dual loyalties or engaging in "smear" campaigns. This was Stephen Walt’s tack in a Foreign Policy blog post wince-makingly titled “Have they not a shred of decency?,” in which he cited, without a whiff of irony, Jeffrey Goldberg’s former service in the IDF as a sign of his un-American motive for questioning the patriotism of one Charles Freeman. (Though in his sentimental comparison of Freeman to blacklisted Communists the supposedly hard-headed Walt does tacitly allow that Freeman's political views are troublesome.)

The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss, who also warned of a "coordinated" neoconservative assault, goes further in his defense of Freeman, stating that he "is a one-of-a-kind choice: with an impeccably establishment pedigree, Freeman has developed over the years a startling propensity to speak truth to power, which is precisely what one would want in a NIC chairman." I had not known until now that The Nation esteems establishment pedigrees and believes oil-rich sheiks are latterday wretched of the earth.

Leftists who praise Freeman on the single issue of Israel-Palestine, ostensibly out of a concern for justice and human rights, say it’s beside the point to confront his endless euphemisms and evasions on other human rights abuses. An unintended consequence of this maneuver is that these same leftists appear even more obsessed with the Jewish state than do the “neocons" they purport to monitor. They also look especially stupid in this instance because they're effectively arguing that what goes on in the West Bank is more crucial to U.S. national security than what goes on in the one country which produced fifteen out of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. How's that for realism?

As it happens, Saudi Arabia is not the only oligarchy toward which Freeman has a strong tropism. Here is what he had to say, on a 2006 listserv, about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, and it's worth keeping Dreyfuss' "truth to power" encomium in mind:

I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, i.e. that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than -- as would have been both wise and efficacious -- to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo's response to the mob scene at "Tian'anmen" stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action.

For myself, I side on this -- if not on numerous other issues -- with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans' "Bonus Army" or a "student uprising" on behalf of "the goddess of democracy" should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square, combined. while shutting down much of the Chinese government's normal operations. I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang's dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.

This is why Human Rights Watch – evidently the latest bastion of neoconservative dogmatism, as Reason’s left-libertarian editor Matt Welch mordantly observed – opposes Freeman’s appointment.  It’s also why 87 Chinese dissidents have written President Obama protesting it without so much as a winking allusion to Oslo or road-maps.

As for Rosenberg and Yglesias, where they do concede Freeman’s ugly c.v. it is more out of cynical (and partisan) resignation than real horror. Yglesias helpfully admits that defending Freeman on principle is not a cause he wishes to stake his bloggerly reputation on. (That might hurt his career more than rebuking AIPAC.) But this grudging concession was then followed by another change of subject: back to the motives that impelled the discovery of Freeman’s China problem in the first place.

Andrew Sullivan, who himself has come around to legitimizing the Mearsheimer-Walt perspective on his popular blog, assembled a time-line of Freeman complaints, demonstrating to his own satisfaction that the chorus of criticism did indeed begin with Israel. Yet left out of Sullivan's recapitulation of events is Eli Lake's Washington Times coverage of Freeman's unexamined foreign ties, a series of articles that provided the journalistic cui bono for vetting further a man tasked with compiling the nation's annual intelligence estimates. (Lake's biggest scoop, in fact, was showing that the White House had not even been privy to Freeman's appointment; Director of Intelligence Dennis Blair undertook it autonomously, according to Blair's spokesman Wendy Morigi.)

So it must be out of willful credulity that Rosenberg emailed Jeffrey Goldberg:

None of the bloggers in question had any interest in Freeman's views on China until Steve Rosen (and some of his colleagues) decided to stir up the opposition to Freeman because of his alleged lack of fidelity to the occupation. In fact, I hear that the offending China quotes were only discovered in the context of a Google Nexis/Lexis search to find incriminating material to block Freeman's appointment because of his Middle East views. China was not even an afterthought.

The Weekly Standard first uncovered the Tiananmen Square excerpt (not using Google or Nexis/Lexis, by the way), and that magazine has in the past run editorials calling for continued U.S. trade restrictions on China on the basis of its appalling human rights record. To my knowledge, this policy has no discernible link to Jerusalem, although it does tend to chivvy die-hard Nixonians who believe morality has no place in foreign policy calculations.

In Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin tells of how the search for Chaney, Goodman and Schwirner proceeded in Mississippi. The police had to drag the lake in which the bodies of these murdered civil rights activists were rumored to have been dumped. The police didn’t discover those bodies, but they did discover other corpses no one had been seeking. Does it not miss the point to focus on what motivated Freeman's detractors from doing due diligence on him when he is provably an inveterate excuse-maker for totalitarianism?

By way of a more immediate example: I have no idea where the Armenian lobby stands on Tiananmen Square or Saudi Arabia, but I nonetheless credit it with tipping me off to the Anti-Defamation League's denial of the Armenian genocide, an erasure of historical truth deriving from a callous geopolitical consideration--and one that benefited Israel, at least according to Abe Foxman. (James Fallows, who inveighed against a Congressional resolution acknowledging the first holocaust of the 20th century because he, too, didn't want to upset Turkey, deserves no credit for standing up for Freeman now. If this is what Fallows considers a robust "contrarianism," I prefer the tired blood of conventional wisdom, thanks.)

At minimum, this strange affair that has seen liberals and not a few conservatives joined in martyring a true reactionary has indicated the level of political maturity of a certain breed of thinker, who, still reeling from the last administration, wishes to make his sole conviction for the next one doing whatever makes the dreaded "neocons" angry. A vice of electoral victory is said to be hubris, but this reeks of insecurity. It also signals just how short-lived the left's hold on power may be.

Egypt Cites Progress Toward Truce As Gaza Toll Exceeds 1,000 [New York Times]

The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, who spent Tuesday in Gaza City, agreed that the situation with civilians was dire but said that the principal hospital was making do with medical supplies, and that doctors, working around the clock, were mostly coping with the flow of the wounded.

“In general, they did not complain about the lack of equipment or material,” he said at a news conference in Jerusalem.

 Palestinian sources: 'Iran unit' of Hamas has been destroyed [Haaretz]

Palestinian sources reported Thursday that the "Iranian Unit" of Hamas, members of the group's military wing trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, had been destroyed.

According to the sources, most of the unit's members were killed in fighting in the Zeytun neighborhood, where they had been deployed by the military leadership of Hamas.

The unit numbered approximately 100 men who had traveled to Iran and Hezbollah camps, mostly in the Beka'a Valley, where they were trained in infantry fighting tactics. The militants were also trained in the use of anti-tank missiles, the detonation of explosives, among other skills.

 PROFILE / Slain Hamas minister was key figure in '07 Gaza coup [Haaretz]

After Hamas' sweeping victory in those elections, the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah intensified. Sayyam set up the Executive Force, a security apparatus that developed into Hamas' police after the militants seized Gaza in June 2007.

An open letter to Gideon Levy, by A.B. Yehoshua  [Haaretz]

When I asked you after the disengagement from Gaza, Gideon, explain to me why they are firing missiles at us, you replied that they want us to open the crossings. I asked you whether you truly believe that if they fire missiles the crossings will be opened, or the opposite. And whether you truly believe that it is right and just to open crossings into Israel for those who declare openly and sincerely that they want to destroy our country. I did not get an answer from you.

 ANALYSIS / Egypt's Gaza truce plan is mostly bad for Hamas [Haaretz]

The Egyptian proposal is mostly bad for Hamas. It doesn't let the organization bring the Palestinian public any political achievement that would justify the blood that has been spilled, and even forces on it the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza, in the form of its renewed presence at the Rafah crossing (as a condition for its reopening).

Once the cease-fire is reached, the IDF will withdraw from the positions it captured in Gaza, and only then will the two sides begin to discuss the opening of border crossings and removal of the blockade, which was the reason Hamas gave for waging war. The most that Cairo is offering is a timetable for the opening of the crossing points, and even that depends on negotiations due to begin after the cease-fire is reached, and it's tough to know how or when they will end. 

Cabinet to decide on unilateral ceasefire Saturday evening [Jerusalem Post]

According to Reuters, the main points disputed in the Egyptian proposal as it was articulated on Thursday were the duration of the proposed truce, which Hamas insists on being only a year, and how quickly Israel would complete the withdrawal of its forces from the Gaza Strip and reopen the crossings. The PMO statement on Friday expressed satisfaction with clarifications Gilad received from Cairo on Friday.

Olmert also does not want any agreement to include Hamas as a direct party because this would de facto legitimize the group. His preference, According to Channel 10, was to conclude a ceasefire "over Hamas's head" regardless of the terror group's position, working with Egypt and the US. 

Ed Zwick on Passivity, Jewish Power, and Hamas [Jeffrey Goldberg]

Jeffrey Goldberg: You're opening in Europe. We've heard a lot of talk in Europe comparing what Israel does in the Occupied Territories to what the Nazis did to the Jews. Are you worried about the way the movie will be understood in Europe right now?

Edward Zwick: You know, the argument comparing what the Jews are doing and what the Nazis did is just such a preposterous exaggeration, because one when one uses the word genocide, you have to ask: If Israel were interested in genocide than they have more than the means necessary to accomplish such a thing, and given that, in context, they're using a certain amount of restraint. Yes, I know the word "restraint" is hard to talk about, given what's happening in Gaza, but it is a type of restraint. What I'm responding to is equivalence. Words are important. Genocide is a word thrown around too easily. This is happening now in Poland and Lithuania. There's an attempt to make an equivalence between alleged war crimes of the Bielskis and the Holocaust.

 The Things They Carried [Yossi Klein Halevi, The New Republic]

Outside, at a picnic table, a group of reservists, some wearing woolen caps against the night chill, are engaged in a venerable IDF ritual: boiling Turkish coffee in a finjan, a small tin pot. They offer us shot glasses filled with coffee. Some of them are students, some work in high tech. A young man with a shaved head joins us. "He's from the CIA," someone says. "Chef In Action," the guy with the shaved head explains the joke. He is in fact a chef in one of Tel Aviv's up-and-coming restaurants. "We hear the food there is nothing to get excited about," someone says. "Not like what we get here."

Jeff Goldberg's insightful-as-usual op-ed the New York Times, while filled with informative anecdotal nuggets aplenty, could actually have been trimmed to consist of only the headline, "Why Israel Can't Make Peace With Hamas," and this: "A man who believes that God every now and again transforms Jews into pigs and apes might not be the most obvious candidate for peace talks."  Boiling down the entire conflict isn't this simple, but boiling down Hamas is.  Either one believes that God transforms this or that group of people into zoo rabble or one does not.  One who does cannot be credited with having the faculties necessary to carry out negotiations meaningfully.  

To go one step further, the above formulation also answers those who would have us believe that the superstitious extremism of Hamas is so much rhetorical garnish on what is actually a material struggle for justice by people who would be more moderate if only they were treated better.  Suppose it is.  In that case, what would have to be admitted is that Hamas cynically utilizes the most abhorrently racist passages available to them in order to rouse the people into a righteous anger in the hopes it will beget insurrection.  In which case could one devoted to the cause of justice for the Palestinians endorse or defend such a group?  If the choice is between column a.) cartoonish ignorance, and column b.) calculated hate-peddling, why not choose column c.) neither?  

Again, this is why the Arab-Israeli conflict is so often misconstrued by those who portray it through the lenses of tolerance or sophisticated liberal theology.  Goldberg points out that what exists in the Gaza conflict is a hotbed of envy, sectarian schism, one-upsmanship and proxy influence.  If each of these is a fire burning out of control, taking seriously God's having turned Jews into pigs is but one of many (on both sides of the divide--remember there are raving messianic Jews as well) ideas that function like the equivalent of kerosene mixed with gasoline mixed with napalm jelly.   

Talking seriously about real solutions requires people on all sides to subscribe wholeheartedly to reality.  Who among us has seen a Jew turned into a swine, a sea divided for a fleeing tribe, or believes that any similar supernatural feat designed to favor one or another ethno-religio-cultural group took place?  The first prerequisite for negotiations should be that whomever is allowed at the table answers each of these in the negative.  Neither the disqualification of the likes of Nizar Rayyan from the proceedings, nor the skepticism of his ilk, should sadden anyone.

If you haven't already done so, please read today's lead story by Adam LeBor on the definition of war crimes. Also recommended is Jeff Goldberg's latest post on the legitimacy of using civilian casualties as an indicator of their commission. Noting that so far, according to Palestinian estimates, 900 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with roughly half of them civilians, Goldberg quotes Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, who offers the following perspective drawn from the siege of Mogadishu, where 80% of the Somali deaths caused by clashes with the U.S. military were civilian:

"If you feel the need to go to war against an enemy that is not as powerful as you are, one of the tactics of the weaker party is to hide among civilians, and use the global media to advertise the horror of the onslaught. People on the receiving end of the bombs greatly exaggerate the casualties and get photographers to take the most gruesome of pictures, and at the same time, the people in charge of the stronger power try to minimize the number of casualties. If you live in a democracy, then public opinion really matters, and reports of dead children swells the criticism of the war. If you live in a dictatorship, then you don't care what the people think. Israel is a democracy and it cares about the way the rest of the world feels.  It gets hurt by killing civilians, so for moral and practical reasons, they're trying very hard to avoid it."

"I believe that culpability for these casualties is very much with Hamas. Take this leader, Nizar Rayyan, who was killed with many of his children. He knew he was a target. If I knew that I was a target, I sure as hell wouldn't have my children near me. It's a horrible and cynical choice he made. But if your enemy is a sophisticated manipulator of public opinion, then this is one of the many downsides of choosing to go to war. Israel knows that."

"The parallel with Mogadishu is that gunmen in that battle hid behind walls of civilians and were aware of the restraint of the (Army) Rangers. These gunmen literally shot over the heads of civilians, or between their legs. They used women and children for this. It's mind-boggling. Some of the Rangers shot civilians, some of them inadvertently and some of them advertently. They made the choice to shoot at crowds. When a ten-year-old is running at your vehicle with an AK-47, do you shoot the kid? Yes, you shoot the kid. You have to survive. When push comes to shove, faced with the horrible dilemma with a gunman facing you, yes, you shoot. It's not just a choice about your own life. If you don't shoot, you're saying that your mission isn't important, and the lives of your fellow soldiers aren't important."

Steven Erlanger of the New York Times drew attention last Sunday to Gaza as a maze of "boobytraps and trickery," designed to kill IDF soliders while also maximizing Palestinian deaths for precisely the propaganda value Bowden indicates.  Hamas militants, in clear violation of the Law of Armed Conflict, have removed their uniforms and masqueraded as civilians, conceding through cynical action a point not grasped by certain feverish critics of Israel's rules of engagement: namely that IDF soldiers do not purposefully murder Arab civilians in cold blood.  Hamas has also fired on Israeli targets from schools, hospitals, mosques and other non-military sites, and it's stationed noncombatants as deflections against IAF bombardment, a stratagem which has led to at least one notable innovation in the field of what might be called non-weapon weaponry:

A new Israeli weapon, meanwhile, is tailored to the Hamas tactic of asking civilians to stand on the roofs of buildings so Israeli pilots will not bomb. The Israelis are countering with a missile designed, paradoxically, not to explode. They aim the missiles at empty areas of the roofs to frighten residents into leaving the buildings, a tactic called “a knock on the roof.”

Michael Totten, who knows something about Islamist guerrilla warfare, having lived in Lebanon during the 2006 war (which he opposed, incidentally), also directs us to a YouTube showing how Hamas rigged a zoo and school in Gaza with explosives:

 

 

From a former IDF solider:

Dear Soldier,

Here's the thing. You've got to help the children. You're not Hamas. You're better than Hamas. So act it. I once asked Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, the late, unlamented Hamas leader, if he would help an injured Jewish child if  he came across one lying on the street. He said no. And he was a pediatrician by training.

You're not Rantisi. So when you operate, operate with the children in mind. It's a burden Hamas has placed on you -- it's no joy to fight an enemy who hides behind his children. But that's what you're facing. And when you come across scenes like the one described in this Washington Post story, help the children. Yes, I'm sure the Red Cross makes things up from time to time -- they don't like you and never have -- and I'm sure some of the Palestinian self-reporting isn't accurate, but, really -- horrible things still happen, and it's your responsiblity to protect innocent people, not make their lives even more miserable. I would refer you to this Jewish prayer for the children of Gaza. Understand its message!

If you haven't read Jeff's book Prisoners, take your cyber self to Amazon right now and buy a copy. In addition to being a terrific foreign correspondent, Jeff has a talent for spotting the absurdist details of war, a trait I can't help but add is probably genetically overdetermined in writers whose ancestry derives from the Pale of the Settlement (one thinks of Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman).

I remember hearing him speak about his experiences over a year ago in Manhattan. If you want a sense of the surrealism of the modern Middle East, consider the following anecdote he related. As a guard at Ketziot Prison in the Negev, Jeff had struck up a few odd but rewarding friendships with Fatah militants, one of whom carried the amity well beyond the walls of his cell (I'm not sure if holiday cards and birthday announcements were exchanged, but they might have been).

Years later Jeff, now an established American reporter, was traveling through the Gaza when he realized he was being followed by a car carrying some farouche, gun-wielding toughs, and that his own driver was making all the wrong turns. Having been kidnapped once before, and being well aware of how these things usually go down in Palestine, he panicked. Then he hit upon a good idea: Call his old inmate friend, who was now in a senior security position in the PLO. The guy answered right away (how's that for Jeff's press clout?), and started laughing. I have to paraphrase the conversation since my memory isn't what it used to be:

"You know I'm being followed."

"Don't worry about it."

"No, this is serious."

"I said don't worry about it."

"Wait... Did you... Are these your men? Is this my bodyguard detail?"

Laughter.

"That's so sweet!"

 

In a blog post at The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg recalls a meeting he had with Nizar Rayyan, a Hamas leader recently killed during Operation Cast Lead.

I saw him last in Gaza two years ago, at a mosque in the Jabalya Refugee Camp … He was one of the more Islamically-learned Hamas leaders I’ve met … In particular, Rayyan was interested in the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, with a special interest in hadith that painted Jews in a negative light.

And what did this learned Hamas leader have to say?

This is what he said when I asked him if he could envision a 50-year hudna (or cease-fire) with Israel: “The only reason to have a hudna is to prepare yourself for the final battle. We don’t need 50 years to prepare ourselves for the final battle with Israel.” There is no chance, he said, that true Islam would ever allow a Jewish state to survive in the Muslim Middle East. “Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God.”

I asked him if he believed, as some Hamas theologians do (and certainly as many Hezbollah leaders do) that Jews are the “sons of pigs and apes.” He gave me an interesting answer that reflects a myopic reading of the Koran. “Allah changed disobedient Jews into apes and pigs, it is true, but he specifically said these apes and pigs did not have the ability to reproduce. So it is not literally true that Jews today are descended from pigs and apes, but it is true that some of the ancestors of Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and it is true that Allah continually makes the Jews pay for their crimes in many different ways. They are a cursed people.”

What are our crimes? I asked Rayyan. “You are murderers of the prophets and you have closed your ears to the Messenger of Allah,” he said. “Jews tried to kill the Prophet, peace be unto him. All throughout history, you have stood in opposition to the word of God.”

And here’s some more on Rayyan from the BBC:

“We will never recognise Israel,” he told Reuters news agency in early 2007. “There is nothing called Israel, neither in reality nor in the imagination.”

[...]

When Hamas seized control of Gaza in June 2007, he said there would be no dialogue with Fatah, the secular Palestinian movement it ousted, “only the sword and the rifle”.

Operation Cast Lead was launched to combat men like Rayyan, someone who drew his inspiration not simply from injustices against Palestinians but from an extreme and vitriolic form of Islamist theology, a man for whom hatred of Jews was a duty to God, and a man who presented not simply Israel itself, but the Jewish people as a whole throughout history as ‘cursed’ enemies.

Nizar Rayyan is a reminder of exactly what Israel is up against in its fight against Hamas, a group that puts out TV shows aimed at indoctrinating children with ideas of anti-Jewish genocide:

And a group whose ideology promotes a hateful and supremacist version of Islam:

Those who delude themselves that Hamas is simply a ‘resistance movement’ would do well to listen to the words of Nizar Rayyan and to take seriously the real message being promoted by Hamas, a message that presents cease-fires as re-arming periods and which proclaims the long-term existence of Israel to be ‘an impossibility’.

I know, I promised fifty, but this is hard. The list might very well grow to fifty -- keep your suggestions coming -- but for now, here are twenty-five top philo-Semites. A couple of notes: I did not include Kabbalah goofballs such as Madonna, despite demands from numerous readers. More seriously, I did not include Righteous Gentiles, non-Jews who saved Jews during the Shoah. That is a special category that represents something much greater than simple affinity for,  and support of, Jews. Some of you might question the presence of Malcolm Gladwell on the list; he is there because he is the greatest philo-Semite I know personally; because he introduced me to my wife, with whom I have had numerous baby Jews; and because he inspired this list.

To read the full list, click through to Jeff's Atlantic blog.

I just picked up Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's tortured relations with the Middle East, and the prologue contains this whopper of a scene, one that is  quite devastating, if true: An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him: 

   A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

And then this:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, "the Jews."

 

Read the rest at The Atlantic.

A hero of mine is the Ha'aretz reporter Avi Issacharoff, who, with other journalists, stopped a Jewish pogrom against innocent Palestinians in Hebron. His harrowing report is here, and Dion Nissenbaum has more detail.

I've written about these Hebron settlers before, and have catalogued their extremism. But it needs to be said over and over again: They are a disgrace to Judaism. As the late, great Rabin said of Baruch Goldstein and his degenerate supporters: "You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law. You are a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism."

The nominations for the Philo-Semite 50 keep pouring over the transom, and the Sanhedrin is compiling the list. But I'll post some particularly interesting nominations as they come in. I suggested last week that readers stop proposing both Jon Voight and Rashid Khalidi (two great tastes that taste great together) for admission. I should have included Madonna on that list, though Goldblog reader Mitch Ginsburg made the case: "I know she's not exactly the second coming of the Ari, but she's nothing if not devoted to Kabbalah."

Yeah, no.

Monica Osborne, a smarty-pants Jewish-American literature expert at UCLA wrote in to say, "Well, of course, Maurice Blanchot should be on this list! (French philosopher, close friend of Jewish-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas; Blanchot said that 'Judaism is an essential modality of all that is human.')" She described him as her "favorite wanna-be Jew of all time." I'll feed Blanchot's name into the Philo-Semite UNIVAC as well.

Reader D. Shapiro wrote to say, "If you're placing Truman that high up, I sure hope you include the original King Cyrus (who, come to think of it, could teach Ahmadinejad a thing or two about how to get along with us)." Shapiro also nominates Denis Leary:

I'm not the greatest fan of Chabad in the world, in particular its Christological, maybe-the-Rebbe's-not-dead streak, and its general fundamentalist, women-marginalizing outlook, but this is a group that does, in fact, try to spread a kind of happiness wherever it plants itself. And it plants itself everywhere. It puts other Jewish groups to shame, in fact, by its ebullient outreach. My friend Esther Abramowitz wrote to note that the "Chabad rabbi and his wife have welcomed and celebrated with thousands upon thousands of traveling Israelis with joy and no judgment."  That's the formula, and it's a formula that works.

What happened in Mumbai was a horror. We're now learning that the people in the Chabad house were subjected to special tortures, but even if they were murdered quickly, they were still murdered, and they were murdered for the crime of being Jewish. It's astonishing to think that Pakistani-supported terrorists, obsessed with the alleged crimes of Hindu India, would go out of their way to murder a group of people who couldn't find Kashmir on a map. But the Jews are a cosmological enemy. I think we've learned that by now. 

So, as you have undoubtedly heard, the Forward has chosen me as one of its 50 most influential American Jews. Me, Rahm Emanuel, Sarah Silverman, and Lipa Schmeltzer, among others.

This honor has changed my life, especially the magnificent gift of 1,000 shares of AIG stock from the finance committee of the Elders of Zion. It has also caused heartache. Friends are envious, even non-Jewish friends. For instance, Malcolm Gladwell is very upset. When we were roommates a very long time ago, Malcolm used to listen to the klezmer stylings of Giora Feidman on his record player. He is, in other words, very Jewy. He is also deeply wounded. "I am so jealous," he wrote. "Shouldn't there be a parallel list for wanna-bes?"

Yes, there should. If the Forward can publish a list of the top 50 Jews, then Goldblog can publish a list of the top 50 philo-Semites. I don't have a philosophical problem with this, by the way: I dissent from the line, first passed on to me by Frank Foer, who, tragically, is not a top-50 Jew (though his mother is!), that philo-Semites are anti-Semites who like Jews. So, a list, and one loyal readers can help me assemble. I already asked Malcolm to provide me names of other philo-Semites, but he said: "How do I know philo-Semites? I'm such a philo-Semite I only associate with the real thing."

Here are a few names, just to get us going:

1) George Eliot
2) Barack Obama
3) Harry Truman
4) Emile Zola
5) Malcolm Gladwell

Please send your entries to Goldberg.atlantic@gmail.com, and I'll post them as they come in. 

Daniel Levy, the director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation (which is run by a blogger, it should be noted) and the director of the Prospects for Peace initiative at the Century Foundation, is one of the smartest analysts of the Middle East conflict in Washington, or anywhere else. He often veers too left for my taste (on only one occasion, I believe, I veered too left for his taste), but he's a rigorous thinker and is steeped in the painful and complicated details of the ongoing crisis. Levy, who keeps his own blog, of course, has been a player in negotiations through the 1990s, and brings real-world experience -- and real Israeli experience -- to the conversation. As we enter the Obama era, it seemed worthwhile to send Levy some questions:

Jeffrey Goldberg:  Are you a Zionist?

Daniel Levy: The answer is a yes, albeit a more complex yes than I'd like it to be.  I would describe myself as a Zionist on at least three levels.  First, and at the most practical level, having made aliyah to Israel from the U.K., taken up citizenship, and made my life there, my Zionism meets the more classical and exclusionary definitions.  Second, I do consider the Jews to be a people, and support that people's right to self-determination in a nation-state, Israel.  Finally, and in many ways derived from both of the above, I consider Israel to be central to my own Jewishness and my identity--more than a religious affiliation, it's a national and cultural affiliation to modern Israel, the language, to Tel Aviv, etc.

Where it gets complex is this--sixty years after the establishment of the state, and alongside all its accomplishments, the onus is now on Israel and its founding ideology, Zionism, to demonstrate in practice that it can be non-expansionist in territorial terms toward its neighbors, and that it can confer genuine equality on the non-Jewish citizens of the state.  Most troubling of course is that for more than two-thirds of its existence, Israel has imposed a hostile occupation on another people, the Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and to be blunt, that occupation will have to end for Israel to survive.  To the extent to which a Zionist narrative has been used to drive forward and justify the post-'67 settlement enterprise (and the discrimination within Israel), it is a Zionism that actually works against the interests of Israel, and not, of course, the Zionism that I am signing up for.

JG: You write about the occupation in a way that suggests you believe it was Israel's fault from the outset.  Whose fault do you believe it is?  Put another way, do you think the Khartoum declaration of late 1967--the so-called three noes--set the stage for the tragedy that followed, or is it not relevant?


DL: The Khartoum noes represent a more complex issue than is often assumed.  The setting is, of course, after the '67 war, with Israel in control of vast swaths of Egyptian and Syrian territory, as well as the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.  Israel expresses a readiness to talk peace and understandably interprets the three noes of Khartoum as, well, being a negative answer.  But historians suggest it wasn't that simple.  See this long quote below from pages 258-259 of Avi Shlaim's book The Iron Wall:

"Israel's leaders watched with keen anticipation to see what conclusions the Arab leaders would draw from their military defeat.  The conference ended with the adoption of the famous three noes of Khartoum: no recognition, no negotiation, and no peace with Israel.  On the face of it these declarations showed no sign of readiness for compromise, and this is how Israel interpreted them.  In fact, the conference was a victory for the Arab moderates who argued for trying to obtain the withdrawal of Israeli forces by political rather than military means.  Arab spokesmen interpreted the Khartoum declarations to mean no formal peace treaty, but not a rejection of a state of peace; no direct negotiations, but not a refusal to talk through third parties; and no de jure recognition of Israel, but acceptance of its existence as a state.  President Nasser and King Hussein set the tone at the summit and made it clear subsequently that they were prepared to go much further than ever before toward a settlement with Israel.  At Khartoum, Nasser and Hussein reached a genuine understanding and formed a united front against the hard-liners...The Khartoum summit thus marked a real turning point in Nasser's attitude to Israel.  At Khartoum, Nasser advised, and indeed urged, King Hussein to explore the possibility of a peaceful settlement with Israel.  This was, of course, not known in Israel at the time.  As far as Israel was concerned, the Khartoum declarations closed every door and every window that might lead to a peace settlement.  On October 17 the cabinet took a decision that amounted to an official cancellation of the decision of 19 June."

The famous three noes are explained as being an opening position and that Jordanian King Hussein actually had something of a mandate from Nasser's Egypt to begin exploratory talks with Israel.  We know those took place.  We also now know that Egypt itself was putting out peace feelers prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War.  In the end, of course, that Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was reached, but only after another needless war--something that might unfortunately be repeated with Syria now.

But here's the bigger picture: the UN in 1947 in UNGAR 181 calls for a division of mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state according to a territorial ratio of approximately 55 percent to 45 percent.  After the War of Independence, Israel is in control of not 55, but 78 percent of the land, and builds its state in that area.  After the '67 war, Israel controls 100 percent.  I would argue that Israel's big achievement today is that we have reached a situation where the Arab world is saying yes to the 1949-67 division of 78:22--not the 1947 plan, but also not one centimeter more than the '67 lines.  Some may argue that if Israel already got a yes to 78 percent, we can surely get it to 80 percent, or 85 percent, or even more--I think that is neither realistic nor desirable, and in attempting to achieve it, we are liable to commit national suicide.

So my bottom line is that Israel needs to take yes for an answer, which means ending the occupation. And let's face it, the fact that the occupation is so entrenched, especially the civilian settlements and their supportive infrastructure--none of that can be considered a sensible or legitimate response even to the traditional interpretation of the Khartoum noes.  Does it justify Palestinian violence?  No.  Is the post-'67 settlement enterprise a huge mistake for the Zionist project and an albatross around the neck of Israel?  Absolutely yes.
We can argue about the history, but the imperative today is to seize the opportunity to entrench the '67 borders, a two-state reality, and to end the occupation (with agreed, minor, and mutual land swaps involving the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but respecting the 78:22 principle).

JG: Man, you know nothing turns me on more than long quotations from Avi Shlaim.  There's an unbiased observer for you.  Anyway, next question: Who's to blame today?  Or put another way, why is the process so locked-down right now: Israeli political paralysis, Palestinian religious extremism, the continued presence of settlements in the West Bank, American disinterest, all of the above?

DL: In answer to your latest delightful question, I'm not too keen on playing the blame game.  I could agree to all of the reasons you gave and add lots more.  But I think we need to get beyond who is to blame and to think constructively and creatively about how to get out of this mess.  The situation is not good.  Neither Israelis nor Palestinians benefit, and while scoring points can always be fun, it doesn't get us very far.  In fact, I would even say that blame is secondary to a bigger problem which is that we are locked into a process that is increasingly incapable of delivering--and we need to recognize that.

I would suggest that there are two basic design faults to what we call the peace process, whether that be Oslo or Annapolis or everything in between.  One, the two parties have gone about as far as they're going to go to finding solutions in bilateral negotiations.  What is left to do--the final points of closure on core issues--is obviously the hardest bit, and I don't think the parties can do that alone, especially not with the current leaderships one both sides.  There is almost a perverse incentive at work to postpone hard decisions and to negotiate indefinitely--that is the path of least resistance in terms of domestic politics for Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Two, the Palestinians are expected to successfully build their own economy, security forces and institutions of governance while in a pre-state condition of pervasive foreign (Israel) occupation that includes an expanding civilian settler population--that needs to be protected by the IDF.  The idea is that the Palestinians prove themselves and then Israel makes progress--it has not and cannot work that way.

So both sides are struck.  The process suffers from the laws of diminishing returns as we keep trying this failed and flawed method and it does no favors to Israel as it creates circumstances in which we are unable to extract ourselves from a predicament which severely damages our interests.  I would suggest that what we need now is effective external intervention to break this impasse, and realistically this would have to be U.S.-led.

JG: Okay, external intervention is needed.  What, exactly, does President Obama do?  How does he get the Israelis to remove settlements?  How does he strengthen the PA and marginalize Gaza?

DL: To an extent, it does depend on what kind of an Israeli government an Obama presidency is working with.  If the Israeli leadership at the time is not clear in its willingness to remove settlements, withdraw on the West Bank, and implement a two-state solution, then I would recommend not investing in a peace process just for appearances' sake.  Such a process would, after all, not succeed, further undermining both hope and credibility, and the last thing we need is another failed process.  Under such circumstances--and most people will assume that this is the scenario of a Netanyahu premiership (although I'd at least test the proposition that Netanyahu can be a pragmatist after all)--I would suggest that the Obama administration makes its explicit declarative intention as being to keep the two-state option alive and viable.  That means focusing on preventing new settlements, outposts, and settlement-expansion (and also on allowing the Palestinians to reconstitute a reformed PLO and Palestinian national movement).  A singular American focus on settlements--and that can be lots of talking and monitoring and upbraiding, it doesn't have to be linking aid--can have a fascinating, liberating, and even decisive impact on the internal Israeli debate about settlements.  The Obamaites could also ask Bill Clinton a thing or two about handling Netanyahu, as he played no minor role in Netanyahu's first term as PM being cut short to barely 30 months.
 
JG: Over the next four years, what are the chances that we'll see another Arab-Israeli war, in either Lebanon, Gaza or the West Bank?

DL: Unfortunately, the chances of another war are not insignificant, although there is no inevitability to there being further war and if we act smart this outcome can be avoided.  However, if one looks at the trajectory of hostility to Israel, instability in the region, and misguided Israeli policies, then that makes for a worrying trend line.

Joe Klein, in his response to my earlier post, cedes the point I make about the misuse of the term "anti-Semitism," and I'm grateful for that, and I'm grateful that he's out there selling my book (there's no better way to soften a writer's heart than to praise his books, except maybe handing over cash money). But Joe goes on to say that I'm "truly foolish" for writing the following:

I know that Joe derives great pleasure from criticizing Jewish supporters of the Iraq War -- the Wolfowitzes, Perles and Feiths --in specifically Jewish terms, while never seeming to use the Christianity of other supporters of the war, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and other such marginal figures, against them. I don't like the double-standard, but it's part of the rough and tumble.

This is his response to my statement:

No, Jeff, I don't derive great pleasure from it. I'm pretty anguished about it. As a Jew, I'm embarrassed by these extremists and outraged by their assumption that they represent mainstream Jewish opinion in this country. Furthermore, I don't use the Christianity of Bush et al against them because their Christianity had nothing to do with their support for the war. For people like Doug Feith et al, their Jewish identity--their ethnic nationalism, not the religious part of it--had an awful lot to do with their plumping for war with Iraq and, more recently, Iran. Feith et al advised Binyamin Netanyahu, in a paper called "A Clean Break," to go to war with Iraq when he was Prime Minister in order to protect Israel. I find the conflation, by some Jewish neoconservatives, of Israel's interests and America's--and their truly dangerous misreading of both--to be appalling. But much worse is their rush to pin the tag of anti-Semitism on anyone who disagrees with them, including me.

 

There is much to unpack here. First, there is Joes's assertion that Bush's Christianity has "nothing to do" with his push for war. I think this will surprise a lot of people, including George W. Bush. Second, I think Joe is essentializing, to employ an unwieldy term, the Jews who supported the war. There's no denying - nor should it be denied - that American Jews, and American Christians as well, worry about Israel's security. (That Christian bit is important, by the way; I know this drives Mearsheimer and Walt crazy - and I know that Joe is no Mearsheimerite - but polls show the majority of Americans are sympathetic to Israel, despite the best efforts of the Mearsheimers and Walts of this country to blame Israel for America's woes. No Jewish lobby would be powerful enough to influence American foreign policy if it worked in opposition to the feelings of a majority of Americans.)

I think Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, were worried about Saddam Hussein for many reasons, including and especially his record of genocide, and I think that many advocates of the war, myself included, were eager to see Saddam overthrown because he was a uniquely evil figure on the world stage. And if the Jewish advocates for the defeat of Saddam argued the way they did because they were sensitized to the issue of genocide by the Holocaust, well, so what? In a different context - Darfur, say - they would be praised for their sensitivity. I would imagine - I certainly hope - that non-Jews who were mobilized to oppose Saddam were motivated by his record of genocide as well. But put aside genocide: I tend to believe, and the record bears this out, that men like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith had five or six or seven different motivations in this war, just as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did, as well.

This doesn't absolve the Jews in the Bush Administration of incompetence and negligence, but it doesn't absolve the non-Jews either, especially because, and I know Joe doesn't want to hear this, the Jews were not quite the all-powerful figures in the White House and Pentagon that people imagine them to have been.

But this brings me to a deeper question: Why is it illegitimate for American Jews to care about Israel's security and argue for American measures that would strengthen Israel's security? In a conversation earlier this year, Joe told me the following: "I just don't want to see policy makers who make decisions on the basis of whether American policy will benefit Israel or not."

Why not? American policy makers make decisions that benefit other countries all the time. American troops are in harm's way in South Korea and Japan, serving as tripwires against North Korean aggression. American troops are in Western Europe, in Kosovo, and dozens of other places, all with the aim of providing security to friends and allies. American troops died liberating Kuwait and defending Saudi Arabia, and those who argued for the first Gulf War were seldom accused of putting Kuwait's interests before America's. So why, exactly, shouldn't American policy makers consider the security of Israel, an American ally, when they're making decisions about Middle East policy? Support for Israel is a question that's worth debating, of course, just as support for Egypt and Kuwait and South Korea and a dozen other countries around the world is worth debating. But this country has been committed in a most bipartisan way to Israel's security for more than sixty years. Now Joe Klein comes along and suggests that American decisions should be made without consideration for Israel, and he argues that those who take Israel's security into account when making decisions - at least those Jews who do - are somehow disloyal to the United States. (By the way, just so we're all clear here, I'm not arguing for or against the Iraq War now; I, for one, believe that the war has set back, among other things, Israel's security. I'm only talking about the rights of American Jews to participate in the formulation of American Middle East policy. Even stupid Jews.)

But let's come to the final issue, the question of ethnic "embarrassment." I find Joe a little bit unfathomable on this question, actually. I tend to be unembarrassed by the actions of other Jews. I don't feel that the idiocy or immorality of other Jews reflects negatively on me, just as the great achievements of other Jews don't really redound to my credit. I have a visceral distaste for cringing (this is the Zionist in me, I guess), because it's a very unflattering, very ghetto sort of Jewish behavior. It seems as if people like Joe, whose anger at a handful of Jews for advocating the Iraq War is so outsized (he seems to spend more energy attacking neo-conservative Jews than he does the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) are saying to the rest of the world, "Those Jews over there, the ones you don't like? Well, I don't like them either! In fact, I like them less than you like them! So just remember, I'm not them."

But here's the thing: The czar is dead. A little Jewish self-confidence wouldn't be a bad, or inappropriate, thing.

Cross-posted at the Atlantic.

Joe Klein is defending Rashid Khalidi from charges of anti-Semitism, and I, for one, am fine with that, as I'll explain in a moment. What I'm not fine with -- what I can't actually believe -- is this line from Joe's blog: 

 I've never met Rashid Khalidi, but he is (a) Palestinian and therefore (b) a semite, so the charge of anti-semitism is fatuous.

I want to be absolutely clear that I'm not about to accuse Joe of being an anti-Semite, but I will note that this the first time I've ever heard a Jewish person, or a non-anti-Semite, make this sort of malicious statement, one that perverts the universal meaning of a term in order to mock the phenomenon of Jew-hatred. "Jew-hatred" is actually my preferred term, because, as I'm sure Joe knows, "anti-Semitism" was a term invented by the avant-garde Jew-hater Wilhelm Marr, who was the founder, in 1879, of the League of Anti-Semites, which argued that Germans and Jews were locked in a death struggle for racial superiority. And we know where that ended.
 
Since Marr's time, of course, the term has evolved from a compliment to an insult, but its meaning has held steady all these years. As I said, the only people who insult Jews by denying the meaning of the term are, in my experience, anti-Semitic. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, told me in an interview once that his organization could not be anti-Semitic, because Arabs were the true Semites, while Jews were simply European impostors. This interview occurred at a time when Yassin's suicide bombers were systematically seeking out large groups of Jews in order to murder them for the crime of being Jewish. By Joe's dangerous new standard, the World War II-era Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who was a Nazi fellow traveler and a frank advocate of total Jewish extermination, could not be called an anti-Semite because he was Arab. So, really, who's being fatuous?

I know that Joe derives great pleasure from criticizing Jewish supporters of the Iraq War -- the Wolfowitzes, Perles and Feiths --in specifically Jewish terms, while never seeming to use the  Christianity of other supporters of the war, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and other such marginal figures, against them. I don't like the double-standard, but it's part of the rough and tumble. However, emptying the term "anti-Semitism" of its accepted meaning in order to score points against John McCain? That's simply too much.

But about Khalidi -- he's a fierce partisan of the Palestinian cause, of course, and in my conversations with him, and in his writing, I see that his sympathies frequently cause him to  distort Middle East history. But an anti-Semite? I don't think so. In fact, Rashid Khalidi is one of the rare Palestinian advocates who argues, as he has with me, that Arabs must study Jewish history, including and especially the history of Jew-hatred, in order to better understand Israel, and to reach a compromise with it.

By the way, the term Rashid Khalidi uses, in speeches and in his books, to describe Jew-hatred? Anti-Semitism.   

Cross-posted from Goldberg's Atlantic blog. 

I've only watched the 12-minute version of "Obsession," the film sent to more than 28 million people in various swing states, apparently by associates and partisans of the Jewish movement known as Aish HaTorah, or "Fire of the Torah," but it was enough for to understand that it is the work of hysterics. One of my favorite hysterics, the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick, is featured prominently, pieces of the sky falling about her head as she rants about the End of Days.

Aish HaTorah denies any direct connection to the film, which is designed to make naive Americans believe that B-52s filled with radical jihadists are about to carpet-bomb their churches, and are only awaiting Barack Obama's ascension to launch the attack. But the manifold connections, as laid out in this article, among others, make it clear that high-level officials of Aish are up to their chins in this project. The most disreputable flack in New York, Ronn Torossian, who represents Aish, makes an appearance in this story, which was to be expected: Torossian last made the news when he employed sock-puppetry in defense of one of his many indefensible clients, Agriprocessors, Inc., the Luvavitch-owned kosher slaughterhouse that treats its employees nearly as badly as it treats its animals, which is saying something, because Agriprocessor slaughterers have been filmed ripping out the tracheas of living cattle.

But I digress. It's said of Ronn Torossian that he represents "right-wing" Israeli politicians, but this description does not do his clients justice. "Right-wing" is Bibi Netanyahu. Torossian represents the lunatic fringe. Several years ago, in one of my only encounters with him, he introduced me to Benny Elon, a rabbi and settler leader who was then Israel's tourism minister, and who, at various points in his career, has more or less advocated the ethnic cleansing of Israel of its Arab citizens. At one point, when Elon had gone to take a telephone call, Torossian and I started talking about Israel's right to reprisal for terrorist attacks. I was arguing in favor of some sort of proportionality (this was after Jenin, in which the Israeli army chose to root out terrorism block by block rather than bomb the city from the air) but Torossian interrupted: "I think we should kill a hundred Arabs or a thousand Arabs for every one Jew they kill." I was somewhat taken aback, of course, because this is a Nazi idea, rather than a Jewish idea. I asked him to explicate: "If someone from a town blows himself up and kills Jews, we should wipe out the town he's from, kill them all. The Israelis are suckers. They should have destroyed Jenin." He went on like this for some time. I would only note that Torossian, to the best of my knowledge, never volunteered for the Israeli army, so he seemed to me by definition a chickenhawk.

Torossian's attitude toward Arabs and toward the peace process are echoed in the approach of Aish HaTorah, which is just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today. Its operatives flourish in the radical belt of Jewish settlements just south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank, and their outposts across the world propagandize on behalf of a particularly sterile, sexist and revanchist brand of Judaism. Which is amusing, of course, because "Obsession" is meant to expose a particularly sterile, sexist and racist brand of Islam.

The tragedy of "Obsession" is not that it is wrong; the tragedy is that it takes a serious issue, and a serious threat -- that of Islamism -- and makes it into a cartoon. Its central argument is that the "Islamofascism" of today is not only the equivalent of Nazism, but worse than Nazism. This is quite a thing for a Jewish organization to argue. One of the featured speakers in "Obsession" is a self-described "former PLO terrorist" named Walid Shoebat, who argues on film that a "secular dogma like Nazism is less dangerous than Islamofascism is today."

This is lunacy, of course. Islamism isn't Nazism. It's bad enough without being labeled Nazism. Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Churchill, shows up in the film as well, and doesn't cover himself in glory: "History has an unfortunate habit of always repeating itself," he says. Always? Does this mean that the Arabs are right now constructing death camps for the Jewish citizens of Israel?

Just unbelievable, but the most unbelievable part of the "Obsession" campaign is its timing: What does this film have to do with Barack Obama? The film is meant to suggest that Obama will provide aid and comfort to Islamism, or is an Islamist himself. There is not one shred of proof on this planet that Barack Obama is anything other than an Israel-supporting Christian. Yes, he went to party with Rashid Khalidi. So did I. Does that make me a member of Hezbollah?

I actually have another idea for a film: I would call it "Obsession" as well, but it would be about the poor souls who believe that Obama is a radical Muslim, that Israel has a right to expel Arabs from its lands, and that America should declare war on all of Islam.

[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter can be read here; Goldberg's reply to it, here. Rosner's second letter is here.]

Dear Shmuel,

Happy End-of-the-Holidays. I don't know what I'm looking forward to less -- two more weeks of this campaign, or taking down my sukkah. I have to get a better sukkah next year.

Before I get to McCain, let me acknowledge your perspicacity, as Bill O'Reilly would say: One of the things that's been missing from the debate over which candidate is better for Israel is the question, Which candidate will make America stronger? Because a strong America is a necessity for Israel. I think that the Israeli officials you speak with who suggest that Obama might actually strengthen America's standing in the world are on to something.

Your analysis of McCain's weaknesses, from an Israeli perspective, is spot-on, as well. It's abundantly clear that Israelis of all political denominations become quite frightened when their neo-conservative cousins (not that you have to be Jewish to be a neo-conservative, by the way) talk about exporting democracy to the Muslim world. If you don't mind me quoting myself, I'll repeat a story I told in the Atlantic earlier this year. In December of 2006, Natan Sharansky received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush, and the Israeli embassy held a celebration afterward. As Sharansky extolled the virtues of democracy to the assembled crowd, a senior Israeli security official whispered to me, "What a child." He explained: "It's not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That's what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan." Afterward, I spoke with Sharansky, and in his charmingly self-deprecating way, he told me the following: "After I came back from Washington once," he said, "I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, 'Mazel tov, Natan. You've convinced President Bush of something that doesn't exist.'"

This is a long way of saying that Israelis, in the main, will be relieved when America stops talking about Arab democracy. That said, I don't think John McCain is quite the neoconservative democracy warrior his enemies make him out to be. He is a more practical man, I think, than George W. Bush. But so, for that matter, is Barack Obama. I've looked for signs of incipient Carterism -- defined here as an overarching belief in the power of the talking cure when it comes to evil dictators -- in Obama's actions and statements and so far, I haven't found them. Which is not to say that might not overvalue negotiations when it comes to Iran; we just don't know. I could go on about McCain's views of the Middle East -- where's he strong and where he's not (I do think that, unlike Obama -- thank you, Joe Biden -- America's enemies might not be so eager to test McCain, in part because they might be under the impression that he's crazy) but, today at least, the McCain campaign has a posthumous feel to it, and so I'm thinking more about Obama.

And so, to address your final point: Is it good for Obama to talk about Israel all the time? Yes. I agree with you, but for a slightly different reason. When I interviewed Obama on this subject, he said that one of the jobs of an American president is to hold up a mirror to Israel to show it where it might do better. This was his very polite way of suggesting that he wants to help Israel find a way out of the territories. The key, of course, is for Israelis to feel that a friend is holding up that mirror, not an enemy. Obama is trying very hard to show himself to be that friend.

To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here; Goldberg's reply to it, here. Rosner's second letter is here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter can be read here; Goldberg's reply to it, here.]

Dear Jeffrey,

Since I'm on my way back to the east coast, where I'll spend the next two and a half weeks -- watching election returns somewhere in Ohio or Florida -- I'll soon also have an opportunity to de-sharpen those re-sharpened edges. Or maybe the sharper the better?

I guess our discussion can only move forward if we somewhat abandon our initial topic (why Israel should not be mentioned as mach) and try different angles with which to entertain our Jewcy readers. You asked about Israeli government officials, so I'll start with them, and generally speaking, I think these can be divided into three main groups.

A. Those supporting Obama for a while now. They include Democratic-leaning Israeli officials -- most supporting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton's and switching to Obama, few supporting Obama from the start. These officials generally believe that a Democrat will make America stronger - hence, will benefit Israel. Some also believe that Obama will get involved in the Israel-Arab peace process and help advance it in ways that Bush could or would not. The more realistic among them think this is mostly true for the Syria-track. There's a fair number of Israelis unhappy with Bush's tendency to oppose -- or not to encourage -- an Israeli Syrian dialogue. Anyway - these pro-Obama supporters consist the smallest of the three groups I was mentioning.

B. The second group will be the one of late-comers to the Obama cause. These people, I suspect, will grow in number as long as the polls show an apparent Obama victory (if they do). It is the international manifestation of the band-wagon effect: essentially, Israelis understand that Obama is going to win, so they might as well try to see the benefits and advantages of such candidate. Talking to the members of this group is pretty funny because one can easily detect the ways with which they try to rationalize an argument they aren't comfortable with. If polls, or atmosphere somehow changes -- these people will rush back to the group where they originally belong: McCain supporters.

C. This is basically the B group without the pretense, and its rapidly shrinking (Israelis, to they credit, were always very practical in nature). It consists of people who rather have McCain as the American president and are still willing to say it.

Their arguments -- and the argument of most knowledgeable Israelis supporting the experienced battle-tested McCain over Obama -- are quite clear: they want a president who understands the need to use power, and does not entertain the illusion that with charismatic personality one can change the Middle East (related to this topic, I really recommend that people will read your Atlantic piece on McCain and the use of power). In some ways, what they fear in Obama is the repetition of Bush the democracy-promoter. It's true that most Israelis think Bush was a friendly president, but readers should realise that very few of them really bought into the lets-democratize-the-region notion. Too realistic to believe, or too racist (Ariel Sharon famously said "after all, it is Arabs we are talking about here"), or too experienced -- Israelis liked the part of Bush that was supportive of security concerns, and vehement in fighting terror, but didn't as much appreciate his desire to transform the Mideast. Not that they don't want it -- they just don't think it's possible. Not now, not this way.

Surprisingly, what some of them see in Obama is a different kind of the same naivete. How's that for a surprisingly refreshing point of view?

Now back to the original topic of this exchange: does mentioning Israel helps Obama with Israelis? it really does. If one tries to find the positive aspects to this constant attention the country is getting, it is the fact that Israelis do feel now much more comfortable with Obama than they did a year or half a year ago.

I'll leave you the benefit of starting the discussion of McCain and Israel.

Best,
Rosner

To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here; Goldberg's reply to it, here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter, to which the following is a reply, can be read here.]

Dear Shmuel,

Happy New Year, first of all. It's nice to read you again; the Ha'aretz site is a barren place without you. And you seem even more blunt than usual; I suppose this has to do with your return to Israel. Your re-aliyah will inevitably re-sharpen your edges.
I'm of two minds about even having this dialogue, because I do tend to think, as you do, that Israel is mentioned far too often in presidential debates. On the other hand, who doesn't like to be the center of attention? We Jews have gotten used to this over the past 3,000 years or so.

Let me wrestle with two of your points. You write of Israelis, "The constant need for the husband to say how much he loves the bride does not mean the bride is lovable but rather that she lacks self-confidence." I think you're a bit too harsh on your countrymen. It's natural, and inevitable, that Israelis would worry about the possibly-shifting feelings of their great benefactor. Jewish history, if nothing else, makes this natural, though I don't think this behavior is unusual at all for any country that is essentially a client state. This insecurity does have unpleasant manifestations, of course – loyalty tests, for one thing, and a weakness for victimology.

The Yad Vashem-to-Sderot Express, which all foreign dignitaries are forced to ride upon their arrival in Israel – "Look what they did to us!" meets "Look what they're doing to us!" – is a particularly unpleasant manifestation of this. Just ask Barack Obama, who would have probably enjoyed a visit to brash, positive modern Israel.
But to your main question: I think that most Jews who oppose the rise of Obama are opposing him for reasons other than Israel.

Yes, there are actual, ideologically-Republican Jews out there; and yes, I suppose there are Jews, primarily in Flatbush, who believe that John McCain will defend the Jewish claim to Greater Jerusalem (which is a terribly important cause when you live in Brooklyn, apparently) with greater fervor than would Barack Obama. But in my own experience, I would have to say that simple racism motivates much of the anti-Obama anxiety in corners of the Jewish community. I don't know what else explains it.

His positions on most matters related to Israel are indistinguishable from those of AIPAC. This anti-Obama feeling is, of course, disappointing, but not altogether astonishing. A black president with a strange name elicits the same fears among Jews in New York and Florida that it does among Protestants in West Virginia. That said, I assume there are fence-sitters out there who are comforted to learn that Obama doesn't actually hate Jews (and is, in fact, very nearly surrounded by Jews) so it does seem useful for Obama, and his surrogates, to remind Jews that he is a something of a Zionist fellow-traveler. In fact, this latest Jesse Jackson episode provides a good opening for the delivery of just such a message.

We'll get to McCain later, I hope. For now, I'm curious to hear you on what Israeli government officials actually think of Obama. Do they really believe that he is in some way hostile to their interests?

Best,
Jeff

To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

Rosner's response to this letter will follow shortly.

Both Shmuel Rosner and Jeffrey Goldberg have written recently of the need for American national candidates to stop gibbering on about Israel. "The goal of Zionism is normalcy, Jewish normalcy," Goldberg noted last week on his Atlantic blog. "This, of course, is an oxymoron, but we can still hope. The cause is not helped when presidential candidates, well-meaning though they might be, constantly invoke the existential dangers to Israel when arguing for a) getting out of Iraq; b) staying in Iraq; c) talking to Iran; or d) bombing Iran." For his part, Rosner pointed out in a long-form essay for Slate that in the Palin-Biden debate, Israel was mentioned a total of 17 times, outstripping by far references to more pressing foreign policy concerns for the U.S. (China, Russia, Europe). It's not in either country's interest to overemphasize a relationship that, however "sacrosanct" (to borrow Barack Obama's word for it), is by no means exclusive.

Jewcy invited Goldberg and Rosner to discuss their mutual fantasy of minimal Israel chatter in an ongoing email dialogue. Below is Rosner's opening salvo; Goldberg's reply will be posted later today.

Dear Jeffrey,

I'll start by repeating the core argument I was making in Slate. It was not about the importance of the U.S.-Israel alliance, or the reasons such alliance is desirable (for both countries). My complaint was about the frequency with which presidential candidates mention Israel. I think this hurts Israel because it presents is as a country that is more trouble than an asset to America. I also think that it distorts the voters' perception of American foreign policy. Israel is important, and is located in an important region. But mentioning Israel more than Chine, Russia, the European Union and its leaders (Germany, France, Britain) gives the wrong impression about the real interests and the real motives for numerous US policy decisions.

The question for this email exchange, though, is how do we make it interesting for readers. If we both agree that Israel's name should come up in the election with less frequency, the only way for us to have a debate is if we have some disagreements regarding the reasons for which we want it off the radar screen. My argument is fairly straight forward: it hurts Israel. It's not about "normalcy" (as you briefly argue in the blog item you wrote about this topic) -- it's about interests. I don't think the candidates really serve Israel's interest when they talk about it. And since both of they claim -- and I believe it to be right -- to be staunch supporters of Israel, their actions contradict their intentions. As we both know, this is probably happening mainly because of politics. The candidates think that they need to keep saying how much they love Israel in order for people --mostly Jewish -- to feel comfortable with them and to support them.

I find it to be both ignorant and insulting: most American Jews care for Israel but are not one-issue voters. They might not vote for a candidate that is openly hostile to Israel, but will hardly make the nuances of Israel-related policies the definite reason for which to vote or not vote for specific candidates. If there's a litmus test, both McCain and Obama have passed it a very long time ago. This does not mean that their different approaches to Middle East policies have no significance as far as Israel is concerned. It does mean that they can stop using Israel by way of explaining why staying/leaving Iraq is the right way to go, or why talking/bombing Iran will be the appropriate policy for the U.S. to pursue.

As I wrote in my Slate piece, I think Israelis should also grow up and stop drooling whenever a debate is moving in Israel's direction. The constant need for the husband to say how much he loves the bride does not mean the bride is lovable but rather that she lacks self-confidence. In the case of Israel, self-confidence in not just a quality that's more appealing, it is also a matter of national security. If Israelis need this constant approval, it means that they aren't sure about the US' support. If they aren't sure, their enemies might be convinced that it's really something they can further erode by pursuing more aggressive policies.

But let me ask you this Jeffrey: Is it Israel that makes Jewish voters uncomfortable about Barack Obama? you've written a lot about Obama and the Jews (as I did too), and you seem to think that something else is at play here - dare we say racism? and if that's the case, can Obama overcome such weariness by talking more about Israel? And what about McCain: can he really convince Jewish voters to vote for him by convincing them that Obama's policies will endanger Israel - or is he really going to scare Americans voters who might think that he is going to war with Iran because of Israel?

A lot to talk about, and so little time.

Best,
Shmuel

Jeffrey Goldberg's reply can be read here.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Dexter Filkins is the greatest war correspondent of my generation, and I would say this even if we weren't friends. We've reported together on occasion; Dexter knows better than anyone how to work your way into bad places, and work your way out again. He's also the author of a great new book, coming out imminently from Knopf, called "The Forever War."  I e-mailed him some questions about his Times story today, and here are his answers:

Jeffrey Goldberg: In a review in the Times today, Michiko Kakutani quotes Farnaz Fassihi writing in 2004: "The genie of terrorism, chaos, and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes, and it can't be put back into a bottle."  The question is, is the genie back in the bottle?

Dexter Filkins: Yes, it is, for now. The progress here is remarkable. I came back to Iraq after being away for nearly two years, and honestly, parts of it are difficult for me to recognize. The park out in front of the house where I live--on the Tigris River--was a dead, dying, spooky place. It's now filled with people--families with children, women walking alone, even at night. That was inconceivable in 2006. The Iraqis who are out there walking in the parks were making their own judgments ­that it is safe enough for them to go out for a walk. They're voting with their feet. It's a wonderful thing to see.

Having said that, it's pretty clear that the calm is very fragile. The calm is built on a series of arrangements that are not self-sustaining; indeed, some of which, like the Sunni Awakening, are showing signs of coming apart. So the genie is back in the bottle, but I'm not sure for how long.

JG: The most astonishing detail in your article today is your description of a parade through Ramadi, which included "American marines and soldiers wearing neither helmets nor body armor, nor carrying guns." You wrote, "The festive scene became an occasion for celebration by Iraqis and Americans, who at several moments wondered aloud in the sweltering heat how things had gone from so grim to so much better, so fast." How much of this can be credited to the surge in troops and the shift in tactics last year, and how much to the notion that Iraqis simply got tired of the killing?

DF: Astonishing indeed. I haven't seen Americans soldiers walking around Iraq without helmets since the summer of 2003, when the Americans, who were popular in southern Iraq for having taken down Saddam, used to do that.

What's happened in Anbar really doesn't have anything to do with the surge and, in fact, it is one of the main reasons why the surge has worked.

In Anbar, two things happened: Al Qaeda overreached and the Americans wised up. If you will recall, the Americans came into Iraq in 2003 in a very heavy-handed way, often sweeping up large groups of young males who had nothing to do with the insurgency. In a tribal society, ­where everyone is related to everyone else, ­the Americans dug themselves a very large hole.

Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, through sheer ruthlessness, became the dominant player in the insurgency. And while the guys from Al Qaeda were very good at killing Americans, a goal with which many Sunnis sympathized, they also wanted to kill Iraqi ­Shiites, who they consider apostates, and anyone associated with the Iraqi government. Ordinary Iraqis, it's now clear, didn't want to go along.

Sheikhing up Al QaedaAnd the sheikhs in Anbar didn't go along. So when Al Qaeda started murdering the sheikhs, the sheikhs went to the Americans. The Americans, chastened by their earlier mistakes, grabbed the opportunity. They made a deal. They crushed Al Qaeda in Anbar. The result is the calm you see today.

The Sunni Awakening, which began in Anbar, spread rapidly to other Sunni areas of Iraq, and that took enormous pressure off the Americans and the Iraqi government as the surge kicked in.

JG: One tribal leader you quote, Hamid al-Hais, puts most of the blame for the chaos of the previous years on Paul Bremer's decision to disband the army. Do you agree?

DF: I don't know. I don't think there are any one-line explanations for any of this. But it's pretty clear that decision had a lot of bad consequences.

JG: Is the average Iraqi better off today than he was under Saddam? Or, put another way, is the average Iraqi who was not directly tied to the regime better off today than he was six years ago?

DF: Today is a moment in time. The calm is just a few months old. The Iraqis have been through an extraordinarily violent and traumatic five years. Many, many people suffered horrendously under Saddam. Ask me the question again in five years.

JG: Is Iraq a democracy?

DF: I don't think so. A democracy has many things: elections, compromise between groups, an atmosphere safe enough to discuss the issues of the day, and institutions that exist outside of government that are strong enough to allow all of the above to flourish--newspapers, political groups and the like. In Iraq, most of those things are in their infancy.

JG: How do you, as an American, feel walking through Baghdad today vs. two years ago?

DF: I'll answer with two snapshots from dusk. I went running in the park in front of the New York Times house the other day as the sun was going down and I felt no threat at all. People waved, people smiled. It felt very normal.

A couple of days later I went to Sadr City, also at dusk. Sadr City is a vast slum that takes in about three million people. It's the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia, and it's been the scene of heavy fighting, as recently as a few months ago. I was with some Iraqi friends. It felt perfectly normal. Then one of my Iraqi friends said to me, "What do you think would happen if you were alone?" And I said, "What?" And he and the other Iraqis laughed and said: "You'd be dead in ten seconds."

Let me just say: I left.

[Cross-posted from The Atlantic]

Like many people who have covered John McCain, I think of him as a deeply serious man, preoccupied with America's defense and its position in the world. So I've been confused for the past few days, trying to figure out why he's allowing his campaign to make a circus of this election, leveling unserious and dishonest accusations about Barack Obama's positions on sex education and Sarah Palin.

Then it came to me: The answer can be found in my new Atlantic cover story! (How's that for Washington-based solipsism?) The story grapples with John McCain's philosophy of war, and in particular with the doctrine of preemption, which McCain still endorses. So do I, in certain cases, but that's not the point. The point is that McCain knows that preemption isn't the easiest sell these days: "It's very hard to run for president on this idea right now," he told me.

So, what do you do when one of your core ideas is out of sync with the predispositions of the American public? You spend your days talking about lipstick on pigs. This might win him the election, but I'd rather see him debate preemption.

Michael Chabon: contemplates sarah palinMichael Chabon is an expert on a great many things, especially hummus and Alaska. He seemed like the perfect person to turn to for a conversation about Sarah Palin:

Jeffrey Goldberg: Isn't it great that Michael Palin's sister is running for vice president?

Michael Chabon: Jeffrey, I fear it might actually be kind of sad that I had exactly the same thought when I first heard her name. At least we can safely assume, at this point, that Governor Palin fully appreciates the deep wisdom contained in that old axiom: nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

JG: Is Sarah Palin Jewish? Her husband was in the Yiddish Policemen's Union. Or maybe the Steelworkers, I forget.

MC: It's unlikely and, I feel, sort of weird the way this Alaskan lady's fortunes have become caught up, and so quickly, with those of the Jews. An exhaustive search of press mentions on Lexis-Nexis reveals that, until very recently, "Alaska" and "Jews" had been included in the same sentence only 18 times, ever. I know I probably deserve some of the credit for this uptick, but I decline to accept it.

JG: What's your favorite Alaskan food?

MC: I know you want me to say moose. You probably also want me to point out that moose (properly slaughtered of course) is kosher. Same goes for reindeer. I have eaten both, in Juneau, Sitka and Wrangell. Reindeer sausage. Mooseburger. Also fiddlehead ferns and lingonberries. But I'm going to have to go with lox.

JG: Alaska. Crazy place, or what?

MC: It's crazy beautiful, that's for sure. I found it a dark place, and not just because it was literally dark much of time, during my second visit, in late winter. Also, I found it (the place, not the people) hostile, and not just in the sense that wilderness is generally said to be hostile. I kept thinking of that bit from Twin Peaks, where the sheriff says, "There is something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want, a darkness, a presence." Almost everything humans have built there is unbelievably ugly. That might have something to do with the air of resentment given off by the underlying terrain.

JG: Do you think Barack Obama has placated whatever fears elderly Jews have of him?

MC: Huh, I don't know, can elderly Jews actually be placated? The Israeli government, as you know, has squandered billions of shekels to date on one ill-starred placation program after another, with results that have been uniformly disappointing, leading it to issue the famous finding: You just can't alter a kocker.

But if anyone can do it, Obama can.

JG: Do you think McCain was a) smart, or b) stupid, to pick Palin as his running mate?

MC: I think the answer is probably both more pathetic and more chutzpadich than either a) or b) would imply.

JG: Are any of your children named Bristol, Willow or Track?

MC: I was kind of excited when I thought Willow was a Buffy shout-out. Like, how cool, she named her kid after a Jewish lesbian witch! It was part of this weird, innocent spasm of credit-extending that I experienced on first seeing the Governor in action last Friday. But the moment was very short-lived, alas. I bet she doesn't even watch Buffy. The names are kind of awesome, in my opinion. But then I have a son named Ezekiel Napoleon Waldman Chabon.

[This is cross-posted from Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic blog, which we think is great, and you should visit often]

Crazy Man Behind A Microphone: Norman Finkelstein says the darndest things Sometimes a guy just can't win. Last week, we noted that a deranged person with a blog for deranged people accused Jeffrey Goldberg of being a "jihadist" agitating for "Jewicide" because his position on West Bank settlements is the same as the position of the Israeli government. Moreover, our two-bit character assassin couldn't look past the idea of minimal dissent from her self-destructive militarism, to notice that Goldberg had made greater sacrifices for Israel than she ever could --- specifically by volunteering for the IDF --- and so might just be arguing on the level, rather than from ulterior, Jewicidal motives.

Well, it looks like serving with the IDF doesn't buy Goldberg any credit with the extreme paranoid left, either. Specifically, Norman Finkelstein accuses Goldberg of having tortured Palestinians while serving as a prison guard. What's Finkelstein's evidence? Well, he doesn't have evidence, but he has the next best thing, assumptions, and he has them in abundance. Perhaps it's giving away too much to Finkelstein to observe that he can't be bothered to decide whether he's accusing Goldberg of being an active party to torture, or an accessory to torture, or merely insensitive to Palestinian suffering.

Jewcy has covered Professor Finkelstein's strange case at some length. Whatever the substantive merits of his tenure denial --- on which his extracurricular endeavors should have had no bearing provided his scholarship was up to scratch --- and whatever the credibility of some of his antagonists, Finkelstein has a pretty well-established history of propagating outrageous, paranoid nonsense. Pathological people can't help themselves, so perhaps Goldberg shouldn't take things personally. In any case, Goldberg did respond to Brad A. Greenberg that "[The accusation] is just ridiculous. I never laid a hand on anybody...One of my principle roles there was making sure the prisoners had fresh fruit...Norman Finkelstein is a ridiculous figure and he is lying and purposely misreading my book." So it would seem.

When Jeffrey Goldberg, an American Jewish Zionist, reached his twenties, he decided he couldn't justify calling himself a Zionist unless he shared in the struggles of Israelis. Thus, making a move virtually unheard of among American Jews, he took Israeli citizenship to join the IDF during the first Intifada, and gave several of the most productive years of his life in service to the Jewish state. (He even wrote a book about it.)

So when he writes an op-ed for the Times arguing that Israeli settlements weaken Israeli security, and hence the organized fronts of American Zionism pushing the Israeli government to coddle the settler movement are hurting Israel and need to rethink what they're doing, it's a fair bet that he's sounding an alarm because of his love for the country, and giving warning true friends of Israel will heed.

"Atlas": Jewess fights crime, antisemitism, own sanity False friends of Israel, on the other hand, go into a petit mal seizure at the slightest hint of deviation from a platform of dispatching all the Palestinians with extreme prejudice, and grand mal when that deviationism comes from a fellow Jew. So it only stands to reason that this crazy, inexplicably popular blogger would try to fulfill her service to Israel by smearing a better and truer Zionist than she could ever be, exclaiming: "JEWICIDAL JIHADI BENDS OVER, SUBMITS DEMANDS [sic] ISRAEL." And there's more! "Atlas" --- as she preposterously calls herself out of some deeply confused homage to a failed novelist-cum-failed philosopher who actually was a Jew who loathed Judaism --- wants to let us know that in addition to all his jihadi faggotry, Goldberg is also a "self-loathing" "jihadi" (she has six separate variations on "Jihad Jeffro," "Jihad Jeff," etc.) complicit in "jewicide," which is later helpfully defined as "dismantling of settlements" in English, and "annihilat[ion of] the Jews" in hyperthyroidic-Kach-speak. Worse still, she notes, Golberg dared to use the name "Jerusalem," which again, in glandularly-disordered-Kachist is "And the use of the word sanctity.Jerusalem is sacred, you asshat." (It's really a different grammar entirely.)

But Goldberg's deepest betrayal of his people, for which "Atlas" would call him a Kapo if she actually knew anything about Jewish history, is --- you guessed it --- explaining to the goyim that "Mr. Obama is actually more pro-Israel than either Ehud Olmert or Ehud Barak...[t]o say nothing of John McCain and President George W. Bush...." To which "Atlas" responds, staying classy, "Obama is more pro-Israel than Hitler maybe...."

Indeed, it was Goldberg's recent interview with Obama that first tipped "Atlas" off to the fact that Goldberg might in fact be a jihadi faggot, or as her slightly more house-trained pal Caroline Glick puts it, "a disillusioned Zionist who abandoned Israel and moved back to America." Because what better description could there be of one of the most authentically and unequivocally Zionist voices --- with all the baggage that entails --- in American journalism?

Here's the thing though. People like "Atlas" and Glick have no standing to pronounce on anybody else's Zionist credentials, because they don't have the slightest clue what the concept of Zionism is in the first place. Hence any sentence coming out of their mouths with the word "Zionism" or "Zionist" in it may sound like articulate speech, but is in fact strictly and literally meaningless. The difference between "Atlas," Glick, and the other Daddy's-Amex-fascisti on the one hand, and sociopaths like Apollo Braun on the other, is that he at least makes 250 bucks a sweatshirt. In any case, people with no moral sense can't be morally persuaded, but they can be effectively shunned.

His review in TNR will no doubt get a lot of attention (Matt Yglesias, one of Mearsheimer and Walt's defenders, is already mentioning his own Jewish grandparents -- never a good early sign in intellectual combat).

Going on some of the quotes Jeff pulls, I have to say, his critique seems devastating:

They do not deny, though, that "there is anti-Semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist." This is a bizarre and foul passage, its foulness easily clarified by a simple act of substitution. Imagine Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing the following sentence: "We would not deny that there is some racial prejudice among whites, some of it provoked by the misbehavior of African- Americans, and some of it straightforwardly racist."

Or, to go for the more obvious example: "We would not deny that there is some racial prejudice among Israelis, some of it provoked by Palestinian behavior, and some of it straightforwardly racist." A sentence like that would be a scandal in all the usual places, wouldn't it?

M/W's blunder here comes at the expense of a topic they're most tetchy about: the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The above rationale for why anti-Semitism is on the rise again suggests that the two phenomena are inextricably linked. Yet M/W elsewhere swoop down like diver pigeons the minute anyone suggests that a condemnation of Israel necessarily has anything to do with condemnation of Jews as an ethnic group.

Whistling through contradictions of analysis and having it both ways depending on which way suits you better-- such are the hallmarks of the "realist" school of foreign policy. Perhaps the greatest irony of the whole sorry debate is how effusively The Israel Lobby has been taken up in Arab media, despite its open dedication to Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations. It's as if Henry Ford were handing out copies of Das Kapital in Detroit.

Here's Jeff again:

In their discussion of these matters, Mearsheimer and Walt seem not just mendacious but also shallow. They are dilettantes in the subject, tourists in the conflict. Consider an example. After cherry-picking quotations from jihadists to support the view that America's ties to Israel brought us the attacks of September 11, they raise the subject of Sayyid Qutb's anti-Americanism. Qutb was a terribly important Egyptian Islamist, and Al Qaeda's main intellectual inspiration. Mearsheimer and Walt instruct that "Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian dissident whose writings have been an important inspiration for contemporary Islamic fundamentalists, was hostile to the United States both because he saw it as a corrupt and licentious society and also because of U.S. support for Israel." But wait. Qutb was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966, almost a year before the Six Day War. It was not until after that war that America replaced France as Israel's chief protector and arms- supplier. In fact, throughout the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration was often quite hostile to Israel. So Qutb's objection, then, was not to American support for Israel, but to American recognition of Israel. If this is the case, then Islamist anger at America predates our support for the usurping Zionists. And if this is so, then Al Qaeda would have attacked the United States whether or not America was Israel's patron, and whether or not the pro-Israel lobby existed. Therefore, as far-fetched as this may seem, the Jews should not be blamed for the attack on the World Trade Center.

In all fairness, Jeff's review is not without a contradiction of its own, namely its treatment of M/W's blame-Israel-first disposition on Al Qaeda and 9/11. Early on he writes:

It is rather uncontroversial to call Osama bin Laden an anti-Semite. He is the easy case. But since many people in the West are queasy about attaching the label of anti-Semitism to almost anybody, regarding the charge of anti-Semitism as itself proof of prejudice, let me begin by describing bin Laden's view of history less inflammatorily--not as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric. He believes that Jews exercise disproportionate control over world affairs, and that world affairs may therefore be explained by reference to the Jews. A Judeocentric view of history is one that regards the Jews as the center of the story, and therefore the key to it. Judeocentrism is a single- cause theory of history, and as such it is, almost by definition, a conspiracy theory.

But then he claims: "Never mind that Mearsheimer and Walt exaggerate the centrality of the Jews in bin Laden's worldview."

Judeocentrism, by definition, plants the Jews at the center of one's historical outlook. So either Bin Laden suffers from the pathology or he does not. The failure here may be only linguistic rather than logical, but one simply cannot exaggerate the centrality of the Jews in a Judeocentrist worldview.

Even before 9/11, I didn't much like the CIA (I've always been more of a MI6 man myself, and as for as cold, brutal efficiency in international spycraft, I'm sorry, but the Russians simply did it better).  But listening to Jeffrey Goldberg's interview the the universally execrated George Tenet has left me in no state of confusion as to how Al Qaeda managed to invade the United States: We had Woody Allen as our last line of defense.

“Well, the only thing I can say—I mean, well, I think people may believe that we knew all the answers to these questions,” he said. “And then there’s the whole ‘Well, why didn’t you resign?’ But wait a minute. I had, you know—anybody has misgivings about going to war. And I thought about this. In my view, there’s a little bit of misunderstanding about the job of director. I mean, you know, you don’t cross that policy line. You’re supposed to provide objective assessments and analysis. They”—policymakers—“make decisions on the policies they’re going to make. Obviously, you know, we said what we said about W.M.D. They do the cost-benefit, risk calculation about what they think that means. We don’t. They do.”

Loyal and talented Jewcy contributor and Faithhacker scribe Laurel Snyder posts in “The ‘New’ Jewish Antisemitism” an endorsement of the progressive rabbi of the Jewish community, Michael Lerner, and his crusade to highlight the “silencing of debate about Israeli policy” exposed in a recent publicity blitz that includes prime time television spots and well-placed newspaper editorials. Some silence.

Laurel’s endorsement – and those like it – only helps to further marginalize the Jewish religious left by perpetuating Lerner’s lousy leadership. Progressive politics in the Jewish community deserves a new representative.

The justifiably-loathed Smarm King has made a cottage industry out of co-opting the fable of censorship in defense of his politics. Carrying with him the lessons learned during his 60’s anti-war days, Lerner understands that one of the best ways to engender support for a cause – or, say, transform pious, well-meaning peaceniks into unquestioning apparatchiks – is to evoke a Big Brother-like opposition sinisterly suppressing the truth. That such a thing doesn’t exist isn’t important; what matters is that it remains an effective tool of persuasion.

The fact is debate about Israel is not being silenced on college campuses or anywhere else. On the contrary, there is no country more openly criticized, supported, or argued about than Israel.

What campus could Laurel or Lerner be referring to that suppresses debate because of their Zionist agenda? I suspect the healthy handful of institutions that stir up campaigns for Israeli divestment on a near-annual basis are not among them. Nor could they possibly be referring to the field of Middle East Studies such as it is, peopled by tenured leftists and pervaded by an attitude that one would be hard-pressed to describe as pro-Israel (see Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America).

And really, how is any debate of any kind silenced these days? It’s not possible -- especially with the young demographic in question, who are expertly skilled in exploiting all the new forms of participatory media to vent and dialogue and find information of any and all persuasions.

Frankly, I’m amazed Lerner still has any credibility at all after being busted some years back for pseudonymously penning a few self-congratulatory letters to his own barely-read magazine, Tikkun. His letters included exquisitely swaying rhetoric, such as: "Your editorial stand said publicly what many of us are feeling privately but dare not say."

Always the fearless prophet willing to speak the forbidden to the shadowy, censorious force of hawkish barbarians, so what if Lerner fibs a little here and there. So what if the Rabbi tends to make things up when it comes to popularizing and pushing his own agenda. The level to which Lerner will stoop isn’t as surprising as the failure of his imagination to create new and original fabrications over the years. The man sticks with what works.

I will say, Laurel, that while the debate about Israeli policy is certainly not being silenced, it is marked by a uniquely dysfunctional quality that says more about the strange relationship between American Jews and Israel than it does about Israel’s political behavior.

After all, what could be more strange than the fact that when you muddle through all the rhetoric and hype, the majority of American Jews and Israelis are in general agreement; we agree we want Israel to survive; we agree any eventual reconciliation between the two peoples necessitates a Palestinian state and even what the general parameters of what that state will look like; we agree that Israel’s action are, at times, unnecessarily forceful and have too often violated human rights. So many of us agree on so much that the extreme polarization of the debate seems strange.

I tend to agree with Jeffrey Goldberg who says that American Jews view Israel as “a place of myth and hope and fantasy and crushing disappointment and embarrassment and pride, but it's not a real country populated by real people…” For that reason, Israel lends itself to serving as proxy for all the other real disagreements – religious, cultural, and otherwise – that the American Jewish community is confronting right now.

That’s a whole lot of layers of obfuscation and the one thing we need more of right now is brutal and unblinking candor. We don’t need more tribal sentinels reflexively branding the mark of “self-hater” on every perceived dissenter and we don’t need indignant leftists masquerading as kumbaya-singing spiritual leaders who view their criticism of Israel as radical.

In his book, The Left Hand of God, Lerner rightly complains that the “Left's hostility to religion is one of the main reasons people who otherwise might be involved with progressive politics get turned off."

No, Mr. Lerner, it’s your hostility to truth that keeps me away. It's time to stop endorsing the Rabbi; it only encourages him to keep making things up.